This, by Despair, bred Hangdog dull; by Rage,

Manwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age.

 (from "Tom's Garland: upon the Unemployed")

Hopkins references "fretty chervil" in "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord" when he is describing a foresty scene. Apparently chervil is an herb related to parsley. 

boughs dragonish | damask

In "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" Hopkins compares tree boughs to damascus steel, which I think is a beautiful conceit.
                   

Robert Bridges

I just thought everyone could benefit from seeing how manly Robert Bridges looked.
The photo in Mariani on p.315 was pretty small so I found the full version.

"Our Father" Prayer

I was going through the spiritual exercises this week and got to the part that says "pray an 'Our Father.' " I thought that meant the Lord's Prayer, but then I looked it up, and this is what it is:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me
Body of Christ, save me
Blood of Christ, inebriate me
Water from the side of Christ, wash me
O good Jesus, hear me
Within your wounds, hide me
Permit me not to be separated from you
From the wicked enemy, defend me
At the hour of my death, call me
And bid me come to you
That with your saints I may praise you
For ever and ever.
Amen.
http://www.fatherbillsblog.com/heart/2008/03/learning-to-pra.html

So hopefully that helps if you didn't already know that prayer!

Spinkhill, Chesterfield, Derbyshire

This is a view of the area where St. Mary's College is located. Hopkins left Wales for to work in this countryside, which he found "not very interesting." (Mariani 187)

Here's a wikitionary article (sorry it's not OED) about "abeles", which are referenced in Starlight Night. I thought it was an interesting and lovely word.
Turns out an abele is a white poplar!

A Windhover (aka a Common Kestrel)

St. Beuno's

From what I can tell, this appears to be the Hopkins's St. Beuno's. 

Even if it's not, it's a great picture anyway...

The Spiritual Exercises

[Ignatius by Rubens]


For the next few weeks, you'll be sampling from The Spiritual Exercises designed by Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order.  In order to do the reflection, you will first need to experience some element of the spiritual exercises.  There is thus a practical element of the assignment, though you will NOT be turning in any of the fruits of those practical labors (thus if you keep a list or write something down that is PERSONAL please don't turn it in).  The written reflection, instead, should be about the experience of sampling from the spiritual exercises.  You might write about the notion of time, conscience, writing, etc. that The Spiritual Exercises commend.  In other words, what is like to wake up in the morning and examine your conscience?  Are you doing that already?  What is like to keep lists of virtuous and vicious thoughts?  You are commended here, in other words, to reflect more abstractly rather than confessionally.

To aid you in this reflection, I offer the following helpful links to digital versions of Ignatius's Exercises:
This site is maintained by Oregonian Jesuits
OR
Here one can find various kinds of files (from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

Stonyhurst College

                                                                Stonyhurst College

Jesuits (The Society of Jesus)

Here is a link to a helpful article from the Catholic Encyclopedia on the Jesuits:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14081a.htm

I found the distinctions between the classes of members and the explanation of novitiate and training particularly illuminating.

Swiss Alps

You are probably already familiar with the image of the Matterhorn, but here is is again. It really does look like a ship upended ("a Greek galley stranded," Mariani 75).

Another Versailles Treaty

While reading Hopkins' journal entries for this week, I came across a list of battles and a peace treaty in 1871. I realized (a bit to my embarrassment) that I didn't even know what war it was. It turns out it was the Versailles Treaty for the Franco-Prussian War. If you want to know more about it here's a link to the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War
Since Hopkins was travelling a lot of the continent (France and Switzerland) during these journal entries, he must have been affected by the war, though I'm not really sure to what extent.

Drawing of Handeck Waterfall

"The meeting of two waters" pg. 196

A pollarded ash tree

Inscape, Outscape, and Instress

Hopkins has long garnered critical interest (and in some cases disdain) for developing his own idiom to describe his perception of objects. There's something fitting about this unique vocabulary (in my own humble estimation) because, of course, he was trying to describe the uniqueness, the particularity of things. To describe his perception of individualities, of the essential and singular natures of things, he uses the term "inscape." To describe the force or energy that sustains this individuality, Hopkins uses the term "instress." These two words are used in a number of ways in Hopkins's writings, with a number of nuances and suggestions that my brief definition does not account for. Please read the definitions below from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and keep an eye out for the terms in your reading.

inscape, n. :

  Hopkins's word for the individual or essential quality of a thing; the uniqueness of an observed object, scene, event, etc. (see quots.).

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 127   His [sc. Parmenides'] feeling for instress, for the flush and fore~drawn, and for inscape is most striking.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 129   The way men judge in particular is determined for each by his own inscape.

1879   G. M. Hopkins Lett. to R. Bridges (1955) 66   Design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling ‘inscape’ is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer.

1886   G. M. Hopkins Let. 7 Nov. (1956) 373   The essential and only lasting thing left out—what I call inscape, that is species or individually-distinctive beauty of style.

1944   Downside Rev. LXII. 185   The prefix ‘in-’ of ‘inscape’ is the operative part. ‘Inscape’ is the perception that comes only with contraction to a point. The inscape of a scene is not its correspondence with an externally conceived pattern; it is that scene experienced as absolutely unique, knit together in that oneness which is nameable only by relation.

1944   W. H. Gardner G. M. Hopkins i. 11   In the vagaries of shape and colour presented by hills, clouds, glaciers and trees he discerns a recondite pattern—‘species or individually-distinctive beauty’—for which he coins the word ‘inscape’; and the sensation of inscape (or, indeed, of any vivid mental image) is called ‘stress’ or ‘instress’.

1948   W. A. M. Peters G. M. Hopkins i. 1   ‘Inscape’ is the unified complex of those sensible qualities of the object of perception that strikes us as inseparably belonging to and most typical of it, so that through the knowledge of this unified complex of sense-data we may gain an insight into the individual essence of the object.

Derivatives

  inscape v. (trans.) .

1953   W. H. Gardner in G. M. Hopkins Poems & Prose 229   Twindles‥a portmanteau word inscaping ‘twists’ and ‘dwindles’.

(Hide quotations)

  inscaped adj.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 174   Two plants especially with strongly inscaped leaves cover the mountain pastures.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 177   The whole cascade is inscaped in fretted falling vandykes.

outscape, n. :

  The outward appearance of a region; the external world as affected by external factors.

1868   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 184   In the afternoon we took the train for Paris and passed through a country of pale grey rocky hills of a strong and simple outscape.

instress, n.

  In the theories of Gerard Manley Hopkins: the force or energy which sustains an inscape (see quots.).

1875   G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 263   Standing before the gateway I had an instress which only the true old work gives from the strong and noble inscape of the pointed-arch.

1944   W. H. Gardner G. M. Hopkins i. 11   In the vagaries of shape and colour presented by hills, clouds, glaciers and trees he discerns a recondite pattern—‘species or individually-distinctive beauty’—for which he coins the word ‘inscape’; and the sensation of inscape (or, indeed, of any vivid mental image) is called ‘stress’ or ‘instress’.

1948   W. A. M. Peters G. M. Hopkins i. 14   The original meaning of instress‥is that stress or energy of being by which ‘all things are upheld’‥and strive after continued existence.

Derivatives

instress v. (trans. and intr.) .

c1873–4   G. M. Hopkins Note-bks. & Papers (1937) 226   You can without clumsiness instress, throw a stress on/a syllable so supported.  

instressed adj.

1876   G. M. Hopkins Wreck of Deutschland v, in Poems (1967) 53   His mystery must be instressed, stressed. 

instressing n.

1881   G. M. Hopkins Note-bks. & Papers (1937) 349   This song of Lucifer's was a dwelling on his own beauty, an instressing of his own inscape.

Tractarian Poetics: John Keble's The Christian Year

Remember that Keble's Assize sermon on "national apostasy" (which can be read here ) sparked--in Newman's mind at least--the beginning of the Oxford Movement.  Keble, as we noted last night, was also a prized poet--his book The Christian Year representing the best-selling book of poetry of nineteenth-century Britain (estimates of its sales by the 1870s reaching into the three hundred thousands).

The Christian Year is organized around the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (which offers structures for worship services of various kinds) and, more broadly, the liturgical year.  When we say "liturgical year," we mean the division of the church calendar into seasons--such as Lent--and feast days, celebrating holy events (such as epiphany) and holy lives (for example, St. Chad's day).  So Keble's book contains poems on specific Sundays on the Anglican calendar (for an example, see below: "Advent Sunday"), on major saints, and on other elements of the Christian life discussed in the prayer book (so we get poems like "Matrimony" and "Catechism").

Keble was also devoted to Wordsworth, and his poetry represents a bridge between Romanticism and High Church Christianity.  Here are a few exemplary lines from the book's opening poem "Morning" (the time of the religious service of matins):

Hues of the rich unfolding morn,
That, ere the glorious sun be born,
By some soft touch invisible
Around his path are taught to swell; -

Thou rustling breeze so fresh and gay,
That dancest forth at opening day,
And brushing by with joyous wing,
Wakenest each little leaf to sing;

What's so Wordsworthian (or "Romantic," as in poet influence by Romanticism) about this?  First of all, the intense significance of the natural world... and I mean significance in two senses: 1. the natural world is important, lovely, deeply rich and meaningful and 2. it signifies a deeper spiritual reality.  Nature, for Keble, helps us to adore the God who made it (and here Keble is much more explicit than Wordsworth, for most of Wordy's career, about the fact that he's describing the Christian God).  The natural world is a vehicle for teaching the heart to revere Heaven.

For our purposes, the nature-loving, Romantic strain of Tractarian poetry is important because Hopkins is involved in the same project.  How does one love Keats (or Wordsworth for that matter), nature, and Christ? That's Hopkins's challenge, and, as we can now see, Keble suggests one way.  Happily for our course, Hopkins discovers another.

If you are interested in reading more of The Christian Year, click here for the file from Project Gutenberg.

I also offer a short sample (Keble's poems have a way of sprawling a bit) from his "Advent Sunday" poem; you'll see quickly that Hopkins is using Keble as a model for "Barnfloor and Winepress":

ADVENT SUNDAY

Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.—Romans xiii 11. Awake—again the Gospel-trump is blown -

From year to year it swells with louder tone,
   From year to year the signs of wrath
   Are gathering round the Judge's path,
Strange words fulfilled, and mighty works achieved,
And truth in all the world both hated and believed.

Awake! why linger in the gorgeous town,

Sworn liegemen of the Cross and thorny crown?
   Up from your beds of sloth for shame,
   Speed to the eastern mount like flame,
Nor wonder, should ye find your King in tears,
E'en with the loud Hosanna ringing in His ears.

Alas! no need to rouse them: long ago

They are gone forth to swell Messiah's show:
   With glittering robes and garlands sweet
   They strew the ground beneath His feet:
All but your hearts are there—O doomed to prove
The arrows winged in Heaven for Faith that will not love!